Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

An anthology of previously uncollected short stories features twenty-four of the author's favorite tales, including "Any Reasonable Offer," "The Powder Blue Dragon," "Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp," and "Lover's Anonymous." 135,000 first printing.

Any new book by Vonnegut, especially since he has vowed to retire from literature, will be welcomed by his fans. But as the author himself says in his introduction, these 23 apprenticeship stories "were expected to be among the living about as long as individual lightning bugs," and they will be of most interest to completists and scholars. Vonnegut's best short stories from the '50s were collected in Welcome to the Monkey House. Those in this collection for the most part work humbly with formulas dear to mid-century middlebrow magazines like Colliers. Included are tales like "The No-Talent Kid" and "The Boy Who Hated Girls," both featuring a genial bandmaster named George Helmholtz, who has to deal with misfit high school boys while dreaming of owning a seven-foot-tall drum. In "Thanasphere," Vonnegut tries out a sci-fi themeAa man is sent into space in a rocket and discovers that space is full of the voices of the dead. In a short, ironic piece, "Der Arme Dolmetscher," a soldier who recites a line from Heine's "Die Lorelei" that he has learned by rote is assumed to "talk Kraut" by a bungling officer. Pressed into service as a translator, he acquires just enough of the language to help his detachment surrender in the Battle of the Bulge. The title story concerns a man who visits his ex-wife and feeds her a cock-and-bull story about being an adventurer. In "Runaways," two teenagers realize that love is not enough to get married on, gently deflating the myth of the then-incipient youth culture long before the Summer of Love. Vonnegut's afterword, "Coda to My Career as a Writer for Periodicals," comments in his trademark style about his midwestern origins and the vagaries of writing for magazines. BOMC featured alternate.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Vonnegut said that his last book, Timequake (1997), would be his last, but no one as imaginative and in love with language and story can resist the lure of the page, and it's obvious that he had a grand time working on this collection of his vintage stories. Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), his first story collection, contains 23 tales, and so does this volume, which also resurrects Vonnegut's earliest efforts, stories written during the fifties and sixties for such popular venues as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. In his engagingly autobiographical introduction, Vonnegut describes his stints as a Chicago journalist and PR man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York; his decision to supplement his income by writing; and his rapid success and evolution into a full-time writer. So, here are his literary roots, a set of stories that reflects their era's eagerness to turn the horrors of war into anecdote and to equate technology with progress. Unabashedly fablelike, they can be either sly or sweet, sentimental or vaudevillian, but all are quietly subversive. In "Thanasphere," Vonnegut imagines an early space flight in which an astronaut hears the voices of the dead. Elsewhere he mocks the rah-rah attitude of emerging corporate culture. In "Custom-Made Bride," he contrasts an earnest investment counselor with an obsessive artist, and several ebullient stories feature a small-town high-school bandleader. Rich in low-key humor and good old-fashioned morality, Vonnegut's stories are both wily and tender. Donna Seaman

Back before the web and before TV, recreational activity included reading short stories in magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. The 23 stories in this collection were published in magazines like the Post during the Fifties and are collected here for the first time. The topics covered include space travel ("Thanasphere"), which describes the first manned orbit of Earth; finding the American Dream ("The Package"), about a new home full of the latest accessories; and an attempt to impress an old girlfriend (the title story). Poking fun at pretentious individuals is featured in both "A Present for Big Saint Nick," where Christmas has been turned into a forced admiration society, and "The Powder Blue Dragon," in which the purchase of a fancy sports car is believed to be the key to a fantasy life. Although many of the stories are topically dated, the ironic insights and illumination of character are timeless, and no one does it better than Vonnegut. Highly recommended.
-AJoshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. System, Poughkeepsie, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.